Call of Duty: Warzone has banned 500,000 players since launching last March. Warzone has a noteworthy cheating problem that has only continued to grow worse over time despite Activision's efforts to ban hundreds of thousands of players. Activision seems to be proud of these numbers but isn't doing enough to actually prevent the cheaters from popping up in the first place.
Recently, Twitch streamer TimTheTatMan has been encountering an excess of hackers on stream. One player went as far as hunting him down until the end of the game and then leaving after killing him. Another instance saw a Warzone hacker get banned live on his stream, in the midst of a game, after one of his squadmates tweeted Activision and developer Raven to ban hackers on their stream. Although they were able to summon a personal ban hammer, many other players can not.
Raven Software reported last week that it had banned 30,000 players in a single day, amounting to over half a million total bans in Warzone. Although it's great that something is being done, it doesn't seem that enough is actually being done to take care of this issue. The free-to-play Call of Duty spin-off recently passed 100 million players and it's safe to say that a notable portion of that number was banned players making new accounts.
The handling of bans has also been chaotic as random Warzone players have reported permanent bans, despite no wrongdoing. So, half a million bans may actually not be a good thing if random players are being caught in the crossfire. Either way, everyone who gets banned can just make a new account as it's a free-to-play game and only lose some weapon classes. It's not much of a punishment for a hacker who can just kill a player with ease regardless, weapons aren't going to make or break their experience.
Fans have been asking for more intense punishments for cheaters for a while or for Activision to double down on trying to prevent cheaters in the first place. With over half a million Warzone bans, Activision should consider that this is a larger issue and that it's not a number to boast about yet. If the game is meant to be sustained over many years and be an ongoing platform, something should be done to get rid of the toxic players instead of giving them slaps on the wrist. If this keeps up, it's not unlikely that rule-abiding Warzone players will quit the game.
Source: Raven Software